Expect derailments from Train Inventory

Like all collectors, model-railroad collectors need a way to organize their goods. Train Inventory is a program that seeks to help model-railroad fans with this task, letting users create a database to catalog their collections. Unfortunately, functional problems plague this program and make it hard to recommend.

The program opened with a .NET Framework error, which did not inspire confidence, and it turned out to be the first of many to come. The program's interface is simple but extremely unattractive, consisting of a gray background with some menus and text boxes for entering data. For each item, users can enter the locomotive type, name, number, quantity, scale, date acquired, cost, whether it's a collector's item, its location, bar code, and a picture. The image viewer component of the program is problematic; we selected a rather large image and instead of resizing it in the display, it stretched the program's interface awkwardly. The program allows users to search of items by name, but this feature once again called an error, leaving us to scroll through our records to find what we were looking for. Train Inventory has potential, but in its current incarnation, it just doesn't work; too many error messages plague this program, and there are plenty of other pieces of software designed for similar purposes that function as they should.

Train Inventory comes as a ZIP file and is accessible after extraction with no need to install.